Slashdot, Orkut and Digg haven't become irrelevant overnight. However, in the retrospect we should be able to see that 1st July 2023 became Reddit's Digg moment. Perhaps not as clear and fast, but the rate of decline now accelerates. Check back there yearly, and it should have become obvious.
Do you think the Fediverse would scale to a 1:1000 instance to user ratio?
Reddit will cheerfully disregard personal requests. Unless you can spend significant resources for a lawsuit, but even then chances are lower than using existing legal frameworks where available.
Nothing wrong with picking the best from a dying platform to kindle the new. Aggregating from multile aggregators is lots easier than mining the raw rock face.
Delegating is a good approach. Picking people you can trust is however not easy.
I would suggest using great care in accepting new mods coming from Reddit. Do look at their history with their community and what they shaped the community into.
Reddit doesn't own these communities. The members do. Inasmuch these mods are interested in helping or were complicit in making Reddit a toxic place should be for the new communities to decide.
It's in our hands. Right now the infrastructure is in the process of being built. That Lemmy, Kbin and the Fediverse in general is the the place to go only became clear a couple weeks ago.
I'm happy Jerboa is now working, major instances now being resposive. Time to build the communities, look into running your own instance. It's worth to do more work now than you can later sustain, to help build the new place.
I have lots of spares and the lamps last forever. I even replaced a failed high voltage power supply a few months ago. I have two with 70 W and one with 140 W. Everything else but three dinosaur halogens is LED.
I also make about net half of my electricity myself, so some wa(s)ttage is ok.
I use some HQI lamps still. Not so easy to substitute a 150 W HQI floodlight with LED.
Ratio of instance owners and content curators to users and also their attitude should be a lot better on Lemmy, since self-hostable and community-owned.
With latest updates with app and server-side it's a lot more stable now. It will be weeks to months until the infrastructure can absorb new users.